Event management systems, such as Lotus Notes offered by International Business Machines Corp. of Armonk, N.Y. (IBM), enable the scheduling of a recurring event using a recurrence rule. In particular, the recurrence rule defines how to determine the date(s) on which the event is scheduled to occur and/or has occurred. Typical types of recurrence rules include daily, weekly, month by day, month by date, and yearly. In general, a daily recurrence rule is used for events that occur once every one or more days, a weekly recurrence rule is used for events that occur once every one or more weeks, etc.
Frequently, a scheduled event occurrence may be rescheduled to a different date, time, location, and/or the like, or canceled. In these cases, a reschedule or cancellation will be required in addition to the recurrence rule in order to accurately represent the actual dates of the event occurrences. In general, a reschedule will identify the original scheduled event occurrence and include data on the date, time, location, etc., of the new event occurrence, while a cancellation may include only an identification of the canceled event occurrence. Frequent reschedules/cancellations of an event degrades the efficiency gains (e.g., storage space, processing, etc.) that are obtained by using the recurrence rule.
Often, users desire to transfer event information between two or more event management systems. For example, with the increasing popularity of handheld computing devices, scheduled events stored in one event management system (e.g., on an office personal computer) are often synchronized with another calendaring/event management system (e.g., on a handheld computing device). Similarly, event data may be shared with another system, such as Lotus Domino offered by IBM, which includes some event management capabilities. However, some calendaring/event management systems do not support the use of recurrence rules. As a result, a recurrence rule may be translated to a series of dates, which is transferred to such a system during synchronization. Similarly, an event management system that supports a recurrence rule may receive a series of dates from another system that does not support recurrence rules.
In view of the foregoing, a need exists to overcome one or more of the deficiencies in the related art.